From the Publisher
"Haiken has written a humane, balanced history of cosmetic surgery, drawing with sensitivity and deftness on impressive archival sources, including surgeons' folders on prospective patients... Her book is a first-class exercise in medical history, raising intriguing questions about normalization, ideological manipulation, gender, ethnicity, and the profit motive in medicine." — Richard Davenport-Hines, Nature
"What makes Venus Envy such an enthralling read is that alongside a host of macabre and 'no — really!' stories... there is a hugely intelligent and perceptive analysis of American culture and history going on." — London Times
Face lifts, nose jobs, breast implants, liposuction, collagen injections — the body at the end of the twentieth century has become endlessly mutable, and surgical alteration has become an accepted part of American culture. In Venus Envy, Elizabeth Haiken traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on a wide array of sources — personal accounts, medical records, popular magazines, medical journals, and beauty guides — Haiken reveals how our culture came to see cosmetic surgery as a panacea for both individual and social problems.
"An informative, often engaging account of the history of cosmetic surgery in the United States." — Parade Magazine
"Original, well-researched, and a pleasure to read. It constitutes an astute analysis of the modern commodification of the body and the role of the medical profession in such developments." — Roy Porter, Times Higher Education Supplement
"This is an important book, raising provocativequestions about the ubiquity of cosmetic surgery in our culture... I'll certainly draw on its insights when counseling patients considering cosmetic surgery." — Janet E. Shepherd, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association
"An entertaining history and serious analysis of the tensions among professional medicine, entrepreneurial practitioners, and the mutable ideal of beauty that reminds us how unchanging is the American search for self-improvement... If Venus Envy is a history of cosmetic surgery, it is equally a political history of beauty." — Sharon Lieberman, Women's Review of Books
Library Journal
Haiken (History,. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville) tracks the evolution of plastic surgery in America from early attempts during World War I to the numerous varieties of cosmetic surgery available today. The author uses materials from the National Archives of Plastic Surgery and the Jerome Pierce Webster Library of Plastic Surgery as well as popular and medical literature of the times to illustrate the social, ethnic, psychological, and economic concerns that have contributed to the tremendous expansion of cosmetic surgery. Haiken also discusses why plastic surgeons who originally practiced only reconstructive surgery began to include cosmetic surgery in their practices. This well-written volume portrays an interesting example of the intersection between medicine and culture and is recommended for medical history collections in academic or special libraries.Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Michelle Goldberg
Historian Elizabeth Haiken begins her enlightening new book on plastic surgery, Venus Envy, by comparing the noses of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand. "In 1923, Americans clamored for an explanation of why Fanny Brice, beloved vaudeville actress, successful comedienne, and star of Florenz Ziegfeld's new Follies, had bobbed her nose. Forty years later ... When Barbra Streisand emerged on the national scene, Americans wanted to know why she had not."
In Venus Envy, Haiken tells the story of plastic surgery's ascent from the exception to the rule. Her narrative is as much about changing American attitudes toward the body and unspoken conflicts over racial characteristics as it is about the medical technology that has made increasingly radical transformations possible. In tracing the development of cosmetic surgery, Haiken examines the intertwining influences of wartime medical advances, pop psychology, racism and, oddly, a certain strain of feminism that champions surgery as a path to self-determination and self-improvement.
Plastic surgeons returning from World War I, where they had made revolutionary advances in reconstructing the faces of injured soldiers, realized that "beauty, as a business, offered seemingly limitless potential," Haiken writes. At the time, however, cosmetic surgeons were regarded as quacks, and something of the Victorian opposition to vanity still prevailed. "It is the duty of every physician and surgeon to try and argue with [patients], to convince them that correction is unnecessary," one surgeon wrote.
Ironically, it was the seemingly unrelated field of psychology that catapulted cosmetic surgery into the mainstream. In the '20s and '30s, Haiken writes, Americans became obsessed with Viennese psychologist Alfred Adler's theory of the "inferiority complex." The notion that physical deformities led to inferiority complexes, which in turn caused a host of other dysfunctions, was so widely accepted that in 1927 plastic surgery was performed on prisoners at San Quentin as a rehabilitative measure. "In breaking down the barrier restricting them to reconstruction," Haiken writes, "surgeons laid claim to the whole body and mind of healthy individuals by linking physical abnormalities to psychological problems for which cosmetic surgical intervention was the prescribed cure." By the end of the '30s, the idea that surgeons should avoid operating in all but the most desperate cases had been wholly reversed. "The disgrace, if any, is in allowing a manifest deformity to remain," said surgeon Adalbert G. Bettman.
Haiken is obviously troubled by the rampant spread of cosmetic surgery, especially operations that straighten Jewish noses, put folds in Asian eyelids and lighten black skin. But she avoids placing all the blame on doctors, understanding that women were demanding many procedures and getting them illegally if legitimate surgeons turned them away. Venus Envy ends on a resigned, slightly mournful note, because Haiken believes cosmetic surgery is creating a world where beauty standards are brutally conformist and stringent. "Most Americans probably would not go so far as to deem the decision not to have cosmetic surgery antisocial, but they are more ready than ever to concede that it may be impractical," she writes. "And as Americans and their surgeons have come to see cosmetic surgery as the most practical solution for an ever-larger number of problems, not having surgery, like tilting at windmills, can seem hopelessly naive, at the very least outdated." --Salon
Kirkus Reviews
An entertaining and enlightening history of how the practice of cosmetic surgery has been shaped by the priorities and demands of 20th-century American culture as much as by those of the medical profession.
To characterize the shift in American attitudes toward cosmetic surgery, Haiken (History/Univ. of Tennessee) notes that when Fanny Brice had her nose bobbed in the 1920s, Americans asked why, whereas in the 1960s, when Barbra Streisand didn't, they asked why not. Haiken's history is full of anecdotes about surgeons and patients, excerpts from the popular press, especially women's magazines, and quotes from the medical literature. It is also extensively illustrated with movie and television stills, cartoons, before-and-after photos, and advertisements—including an astonishing one for a
"Homely Girl Contest" run by the New York Daily Mirror in 1924. Haiken details how this field of surgery developed after WW I, the attempts of the American Board of Plastic Surgery to control its practice, and the discovery by surgeons that prosperity lay not in reconstructive but in purely cosmetic surgery. She reveals how surgeons who were reluctant to be linked to "beauty" doctors found medical justification for cosmetic procedures in psychology: They were curing inferiority complexes caused by patients' perceived imperfections. While facial surgery receives the greater part of Haiken's attention, she also gives a brief history of breast surgery and touches on liposuction and penile enhancement. Perhaps most interesting is her discussion of the use of plastic surgery to conceal or minimize physical signs of ethnicity. Using Michael Jackson as a case in point, she demonstrates the desire of many members of minority groups to conform to narrow American ideals of beauty.
A warts-and-all portrait of a medical speciality that still evokes ambivalence in individuals and in the culture at large.
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